This ReadMe file is for "Ownership and Productivity in Vertically-Integrated Firms: Evidence from the Chinese Steel Industry"
by Loren Brandt, Feitao Jiang, Yao Luo, Yingjun Su
Accepted by the Review of Economics and Statistics

The Chinese Iron and Steel Association (CISA) constructs the monthly panel data and publishes China Steel Yearbook annually. Monthly panel data are available (for a fee) from data service companies, such as MySteel (https://www.mysteel.com/) and CuSteel (http://www.custeel.com/), who collaborate with CISA. Databases such as CNKI (https://www.cnki.net/) compile information on China Steel Yearbook. Hardcopies are also available for purchase on the internet.

As a firm may operate several facilities, we identify the facilities and the equipment they operate as follows. For a vertically-integrated facility, the linkage of upstream and downstream equipment is determined at its design stage, and the production capacity of each stage should be in proportion to its immediate downstream. As such, the output of each stage strictly aligns with one another in any period. By industry convention, the ratio of pig-iron production to steel production is roughly 1 to 1, and that of sinter to pig-iron is 1.25 to 1. We match the set of equipment upstream and downstream according to the monthly output ratios and construct facility identifiers accordingly.

1. Variable List.pdf provides a detailed explanation for the variables in the data. 

2. The following list describes the purpose of each Stata file that we provide. 

1) data_clean.do prepares data for analysis from raw data. 
2) interdependence_stage.do generates stage-level production function estimates and ownership premiums.
3) interdependence_facility.do generates facility-level ownership premiums.
4) interdependence_standard_error.do generates standard errors.
5) interdependence_kprice_steel.do generates estimates for the capital price-adjusted production function.
6) data_descriptive.do generates summary statistics for Table1 - Table 3. 
7) acf_mata_sinter.do, acf_mata_iron.dta, acf_mata_steel.do are the optimization programs for the gmm estimation. 